Modelo de evaluación del programa de salud "Familias en riesgo biopsicosocial" en la atención primaria: Centro de salud Villa O'higgins en la comuna de La Florida

Abstract

The Villa O’Higgins Health Care Center of La Florida is developing since 1994 a family assistance program called “Program for Families at Biopsychological Risk”, which is intended for poor families with low assistance in health care and high biopsychological risk. A multidisciplinary team including members of the Psychology School, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and members of the Health Care Center is developing a research project, with the general objective of improving significantly the quality of the Program for Families at Biopsychological risk. This paper presents a summary of the Family Program and reports the main results obtained in the first evaluation on the quality of the Program, concerning social, technical and economical quality, both at the structural level and at the process level, according to the Saraceno and Leval Model (1992). The main results show the acceptance of the approach by the local health teams and the patients, and adequate accessibility to the program and a reasonable cost, in view of the complexity of the families. The main difficulties arise because of the difficult physical health problems and especially of mental health problems, the lack of training on the part of the health team, the traditional organization of health programs in Chile and the lack of appropriate indicators to evaluate their effectiveness. The possibilities of applying a Family Health Model in Primary Care, the development of effective methods of evaluation, and the participation in the systems organized arround the population’s health and sickness problems, are also discussed in this paper.